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Why Druva Is a Natural Fit for VMware Cloud on AWS Data Protection

As more organizations turn to VMware Cloud on AWS, the need for seamless data protection across on-premises and cloud workloads is growing, too. See how Druva Phoenix- a VMware Ready solution helps organizations simplify the task of backup and recovery, giving IT leaders peace of mind that data is protected.

 

VMware Cloud on AWS adoption is growing year over year, experiencing triple digit growth last quarter.  VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered solution by AWS and VMware that launched in August 2017. This is an integrated cloud service that allows organizations to seamlessly migrate, extend and protect their on-premises VMware vSphere-based environments to the AWS cloud. 

With more workloads running on  VMware Cloud on AWS than ever before, there’s a growing need for secure, seamless backup and recovery of all that data. 

Druva Phoenix – the scalable, all-in-one backup, disaster recovery (DR), archival and analytics solution – has emerged as a clear frontrunner in the data recovery stakes. Read on to see how Druva makes data protection simple, while dramatically reducing costs and improving data visibility for today’s complex information environments.

Here are a few more titbits:

  • VMware Cloud on AWS is a full VMware Software-Defined Data Center stack that is deployed, ready and running on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure.
  • It runs directly on the servers with no additional layers between vSphere and the bare-metal system.
  • It is automatically deployed and configured with vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage and NSX for networking capabilities.
  • It is a hybrid cloud solution that can be connected to an on-premises data center and customers get single pane of glass view of their resources running in the cloud as well as in their on-premises data center. With VMware HCX (which is a migration tool included as a part of the service), customers can bulk migrate existing virtual machines (VMs) into the new VMware Cloud on AWS without downtime. Also, organizations can easily add more capacity to their existing vSphere cluster within few minutes as per their needs.

Druva -A natural fit

Being a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Druva is architecturally a natural fit in the cloud space. In fact, it was the first SaaS data protection solution certified for VMware Cloud on AWS.

When you protect your VMware Cloud on AWS virtual machines (VMs) with Druva, your life becomes much easier than if you were to use an on-premises and/or appliance-based solution. Here’s why:

  •  Druva is SaaS (Software as a Service), so you need not worry about hosting and managing a data protection solution. Druva does this for you, across backup, archival, and disaster recovery.
  • There’s no need to stress about deploying multiple components and creating Amazon S3 buckets to store backup data.  All you need to do is deploy a Druva Backup Proxy and everything else is then managed by Druva, from the Druva Cloud.
  • Druva’s 100% SaaS architecture (outlined below) allows you to easily scale up, enabling you to protect hundreds of thousands of VMs across multiple VMware Cloud clusters.
  • With Druva, you’ll have a single pane of glass to manage both on-premises VMware and VMware Cloud deployments.
  • Druva’s patented global deduplication significantly lowers the amount of backup data stored in the Druva Cloud, delivering cost savings since you only pay for data actually consumed in Amazon S3.   
  • By switching to a cloud-based solution for data protection, you eliminate all hardware, patching, maintenance and more – reducing your total cost of ownership by up to 50%. 

Market-leading capabilities

Druva’s data center backup and disaster recovery solution, Druva Phoenix, offers best-in-class features. It:

  • Uses native VMware APIs to backup and restore data
  • Leverages VMware change block tracking (CBT) to track incremental changes
  • Offers file-level recovery to a VM
  • Leverages HotAdd transport mode for backups 
  • Has the ability to configure VMs based on tags, datastores, clusters and automated policy configuration
  • Delivers automated disaster recovery in AWS with orchestration and failback capabilities
  • Can perform SQL application-aware backups and restores
  • Provides multiple restore options for backed-up VMs:  
    • Restore VMs to the same VMware Cloud Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) from which they were backed up
    • Restore VMs to a different SDDC in VMware Cloud 
    • Restore VMs to an on-premises data center 

Similarly, VMs backed up from an on-premises data center can be restored to any VMware Cloud SDDC.

An architecture fundamentally designed to support VMware Cloud

Druva’s SaaS architecture is the perfect fit for VMware Cloud. The following diagram illustrates this architecture:

  • To backup and restore VMs hosted on your VMware Cloud setup, you’ll simply deploy the Druva Phoenix backup proxy. This backup proxy is the client-side component that detects the VMs running on your setup and executes the backup and restore requests from the Druva Cloud. 
  • Data is processed at the backup proxy end for deduplication and then deduplicated data is then sent over to the Druva cloud. 
  • By default, data flows to the Druva cloud over a network restricted to the AWS environment. 
  • An optional software component, CloudCache, is used for remote office/branch office (ROBO) use cases to store data locally on premise.

Get going in three simple steps

In just 3 simple steps you can get going and start backing up your VMware Cloud virtual machines. 

  1. Ensure that your VMware Cloud SDDC firewall rules are configured to enable https traffic over port 443 for the communication through Compute and Management Gateways.
    Here’s why: The Druva Phoenix backup proxy communicates with Druva on port 443. This communication is outbound only, so you’ll need to create an inbound traffic rule. The backup proxy also communicates with the vCenter on port 443 to both understand the VMware hierarchy and to communicate with the virtual machines to perform backups and restores.  For more information, visit Druva’s Docs Center. 
  2. Deploy the backup proxy and register your VMware setup with Druva.  
  3. Configure your VMs for backup. 

Learn more

Here are some additional resources about Druva and VMware Cloud on AWS:

 

Going to VMworld 2020? Join Druva at one of our sessions: 

 

Not planning to attend? Schedule a meeting with us to learn more about Druva’s industry-leading SaaS backup solution for VMware. 

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